http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
DO DEMOCRATS like
Hillary Clinton and Al Gore really give a
da-n about children, minorities and the poor? That's their main
claim on voters' allegiance, but is it really who they are? In a
previous column, I pointed out that Clinton -- who proclaims the
interests of children to be the priority of her political career --
launched her Senate campaign in New York by announcing her
support for the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact. This
legislation, sponsored by the milk cartel, would artificially raise the
price of milk up to 43 cents a gallon. Besides dairy farmers in
Minnesota and Wisconsin, the constituencies who would be most
hurt by this legislation are poor children.

A recent column by Dick Morris in the New York Post reveals
the callous cynicism with which Clinton has approached the lives
and well-being of children throughout her political career. In
Arkansas, Clinton was the head of Gov. Bill Clinton's
education-reform effort. The Arkansas schools were a mess,
registering at the bottom of the nation's educational ladder. Since
Arkansas is one of the poorest states in the union, a failing school
system meant that its disadvantaged children would be denied the
only opportunity they would probably ever get to lift themselves
out of poverty and into a decent life.

Poor teaching has an obvious relation to poor student
performance (though teachers' unions would prefer everyone
forget that). A Tennessee study has shown that the quality of a
teacher can affect students' performances by as much as 50
percent, regardless of income, ethnicity or class size (within
normal parameters). Hillary Clinton's team developed a program
to test the basic knowledge and skills of all Arkansas teachers.
(Having something to teach would seem to be a reasonable job
description for this profession.) Clinton's reform was even
moderate. Those teachers who failed the statewide test would be
given two years to make up their deficiencies and then would be
given the test again. If, after two years of effort, they still could
not demonstrate basic skills, they would be discharged.

Clinton's education-reform plan received
widespread support from parents around the
state. But the plan was also fiercely opposed
by the teachers unions -- the core of the
Democratic political base. Union members
picketed her public appearances and the
organizations themselves withdrew their
political support from Gov. Clinton. How did
the Clintons respond?

By screwing the children.

When the test results were tabulated, a large percentage of the
teachers had failed. This was obviously a crucial reason why
Arkansas children had been performing so poorly. (Their teachers
didn't know what they were talking about.) But this grim reality
was not uppermost on Hillary Clinton's mind. What she and her
husband were concerned about was politics, including damage
control.

So they called in Morris. They told him that they were worried
that if they failed that many teachers the political reaction from the
unions would be too great. On the other hand, since they hadn't
released the test scores, there was still time to rig the results.

"What percentage should we fail?" Gov. Clinton asked Morris.

"What percent actually flunked the test?" Morris replied. "It was a
disaster," Gov. Clinton said. "It was way too high. If I enforced
the passing grade, I'd have to flunk a third or a half of them. I
can't do that. We'd particularly have to fire a high percentage of
minority t

eachers."
The solution? Morris was told to poll Arkansas voters and find
out what percentage of the teachers they expected to fail the test.
As Gov. Clinton had said to Morris, "I can decide what score is
passing and what is failing." Morris' polling revealed that
Arkansas voters expected 10 percent of the teachers to fail,
rather than the 30-50 percent who actually failed. But when the
Clinton administration released the "results" of the tests to the
public, it reported that only 10 percent had failed. In the end, only
a handful of Arkansas' incompetent teachers lost their jobs.

It takes a what?

This decision -- to screw the children rather than buck the
teachers' unions -- is one that Democrats like Hillary Clinton
make every day in America, as they have done for the past 50
years. Since most of the failing schools in America are in urban
areas controlled by Democrats, poor and minority children are
the principal victims of these decisions.

On Jan. 20, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran an
astounding story as the lead article on its front page. The article
reported that the Los Angeles Unified School District had
decided to drastically scale back a plan to end "social promotion"
in the public schools. "Social promotion" is a term for the policy
of promoting students who failed to learn anything in the previous
year. It's the way an appalling number of American youth --
particularly immigrant and minority youth -- graduate high school
although they are functionally illiterate.

George W. Bush has made his educational record in Texas,
where he ended social promotion, a prominent feature of his
presidential run. Perhaps inspired by this, the Los Angeles Unified
School District had decided to end the policy as well. What
changed its mind was a feasibility study that showed that if the
policy were implemented it would have to hold back 350,000
children, or half of all the students in Los Angeles public schools.
The vast majority of those affected are poor, Hispanic and black.

Think of the atrocity that is being committed here. First, the
"educators" are not educating these children, whose only hope to
get into the economy is to learn something in school. Instead, they
are failing. That in itself ought to be a crime. But then the same
educators have decided to deceive the kids by passing them on to
the next grade. That is diabolical. We're not going to teach you,
but we're going to lie to you and tell you that we have. You're not
going to find out that you've learned nothing until you graduate
and go into the job market as a functional illiterate, when it's too
late. We're going to screw you good. And then we're going to run
as the "education party"!

It gets worse. This week the Los Angeles Unified School District
proposed a very modest clause in its contract negotiations with
the teachers union that would provide a bonus to individual
teachers who raised student test scores. The union went ballistic.
The president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles denounced
the clause as an "attack on teachers" and threatened a strike. In
the same negotiations, the teachers union is demanding a 21
percent pay raise for all its teachers -- competent and
incompetent alike. In other words, three months after the school
district revealed that 350,000 students are learning absolutely
nothing in its schools, the teachers want a 21 percent pay hike as
a reward for their failure.

Enter Gore, the official candidate of the
teachers unions, the "education candidate."
Gore wants to spend $115 billion on
teacher-union acceptable plans for "education
reform." He wants to spend $25 billion on
school buildings and $50 billion on preschools
and the rest on more teachers to reduce
classroom size. But what use are school
buildings if the schools don't teach and the
children aren't learning? Head Start is the most
highly touted preschool program. Yet every study shows that
Head Start improves student performance only in the first couple
of years and then all the gains evaporate.

In California, where it has been a major program for years,
reduction of class size has not resulted in significant test-score
improvement either. Instead it has led to teacher shortages and
the lowering of standards for teacher recruitment -- the heart of
the problem. Gore's education reform is just the same old
Democratic cynicism magnified by federal billions: Do what looks
good or what feels good even though you know it won't work.
Pretend you're the education party; screw the children.

Oh yes, and be sure to send your own kids, like Chelsea and Al
Gore Jr. to fancy private schools that you can afford.

Here's an alternative that has a chance to work and that will
therefore be hotly opposed by the teachers unions and by
Democrats like Clinton and Gore. Let's have a $150 billion
"Marshall Plan" for poor children in failed government schools.
There are 12 million of these poor children in schools across the
United States. These are the "Title I" children who qualify for free
school lunches. These are the children who are not being taught
by the public schools. Give them full-tuition scholarships now so
their parents can find them schools -- private, parochial,
corporate -- that will teach them. Give them exactly the same
tuition that their public schools now get. Give them the
scholarships for three years with the understanding that if their test
scores improve they will qualify for three more. Give the schools
three years to raise their students' average scores in order to
qualify for the scholarship grants.

This plan will not take money out of the existing public schools.
But it will reduce their class sizes. It will not give their teachers an
incentive to teach, but the competition of a new school system
might provide public educators (and perhaps even the socialists in
the teachers unions) with the push they need to connect teachers'
performances to their rewards.

The most important gain of all however, will be the rescue of
millions of poor and minority children from the inevitability of
blighted lives, and will give them instead a shot at the American
dream.